Soon after meeting Ladan Radafshar for what was a very brief interaction, she began appearing everywhere in my life.
It first happened when I mentioned her to my best friend, who remembered meeting her years ago at a party. Within days, her face popped up on the Instagram feed of one of my college classmates. Weeks later, during a haircut, I quickly discovered the two of us see the same stylist and frequent the same bars. This is the stuff of Old Portland, I know, but I find it interesting that Radafshar’s career objective is to embrace the burgeoning persona of the city we both inhabit: Portland as tech haven, Portland as millennial mecca, Portland as modern metropolis full of modern people.
Radafshar is the founder of FernDate, a local branding service geared toward those looking for love online. Using a background in Nike’s marketing department and a degree in psychology, Radafshar makes a living curating clients’ pictures and profiles while helping them navigate apps and sites like Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, and Match.com. Finding the term “matchmaking” outdated, Radafshar prefers “personal branding for online dating sites.”
It’s clear why Radafshar finds her role both advisory and creative. Clients approach Radafshar with the age-old dilemma of trouble with relationships and chronic datelessness (the vast majority of her clients are cisgender and straight, and tend to be somewhere in their late 20s to 40s). For a considerable fee, determined on a client-by-client basis, Radafshar provides a consultation, oversees a makeover, coordinates a photo shoot, and works with an associate to copyedit the profile content for each individual client. She operates on the assumption that bad luck in dating is ultimately circumstantial and essentially due to a certain degree of technological illiteracy. On the welcome page of Fern’s highly stylized website, an omniscient serif font boldly declares to its viewer: It’s Not You, It’s Your Profile.
Though I am wholly skeptical of online dating and its ever-growing demand among today’s singles, the prospect of channeling one’s brand is precisely what fascinates me about Radafshar’s business model. We are now in an era when a person’s app blurb and the quality of their photographs dictate social currency. But is this entirely new, or just an antiquated practice reinterpreted through a modern lens? Radafshar herself says, “The old matchmaking concept and idea is dead.” While that may be true, part of me still likes to imagine Radafshar meeting her clients with her head wrapped in a shawl, like the character of Yente in Fiddler on the Roof.